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Weather.com Moving to Drupal

Posted on Wed, May 15, 2013 by Dave Terry

Today, I am proud to announce that one of the highest profile websites in the world, Weather.com, will be joining the Drupal community. With 100 million unique visitors per month, to my knowledge, Weather.com will be the highest traffic Drupal site in existence, validating the open source content management system's power and flexibility within the high-traffic website landscape.

It is easy to understand why Weather.com, based in Atlanta, Ga., though barely two years into a contract with its current vendor, needed to rethink its content management system approach. One of the primary goals of the media organization is to get content out of the editor’s bay and onto its site in minutes. Anything that slows that process down, stands in the way of the company’s success.

The existing CMS takes too long to get content to the audience and is cumbersome. Users have reported that the system had a clunky, hard-to-use interface and required up to 14 clicks just to publish content. With the velocity at which weather reports occur, Weather.com needed a platform that would allow content administrators to rapidly release those updates. This is an area where Drupal excels.

To identify a new CMS, Weather.com spent about a year doing a significant amount of due diligence, ruling out proprietary systems, such as Adobe CQ and SDL Tridion. Weather.com did not want to be held hostage to a 5-year product road map or be highly vendor dependent. This ruled out closed-source code options. Drupal became the top choice for its ease of use, flexibility, and speed in which it allowed users—even non-technically savvy ones—to publish new content. Additionally, the ability to innovate and create customized features were highly appealing.

"We have often turned to excellent large-scale open source projects to solve our technology needs. Drupal is a fantastic CMS backed by a highly skilled and motivated set of developers. It is a great fit for us from both a technological and cultural standpoint," said Chris McClellen, Senior Vice President, Systems Engineering for The Weather Company.

Over the last six months, Mediacurrent and Acquia have been shepherding Weather.com’s on-ramping of Drupal via a proof-of-concept and discovery engagement. The media organization will now have a platform it can grow with and will no longer need to worry about delivering timely content to its massive amount of followers. We are looking forward to the next part of the journey.
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Dave Terry is a partner at Mediacurrent, a Drupal consultancy based in Atlanta, GA. In addition to making sure everything is running smoothly behind the scenes, Dave’s most important responsibility is ensuring that Mediacurrent exceeds client expectations on every project.

Wordpress excels at blogging and general content management, but
Drupal is so much more. Thanks to it's extensive hook system and
other internal APIs, you can build entire applications around it with
very complex logic, especially with Drupal 7's entity API and the
coming services layer baked into D8. Furthermore, having looked at
the source code of a number of Wordpress plugins I honestly have to
say I am really unimpressed with the quality of their codebase.
Drupal code (both core and contrib) just seems far cleaner.

For an example of the power and flexibility of Drupal, check out
surexdirect.com - that is an entire insurance application system built
using the entity API. Policies, drivers, cars, and homes, are all
entities with references between them. Forms are generated
dynamically based off the entity objects through the existing API
classes (though often extended in this case). It leverages entity
revisions as well. There is also a significant amount of integration
with third party services. This is probably about as complex an
application as you'd want to build in Drupal 7, but it is
certainly not the limit, and Drupal 8 will be even more adaptable to
these kinds of complex applications.

I wouldn't even dream of attempting something like that in
Wordpress. ;-)

Having been involved in the launch of the original flat html
weather.com in 1995, my best wishes and respect goes with their choice
of Drupal to push into the future. I found it over 6 years ago and
have been using it for data driven smallish sites ever since. It will
be fun to watch the roll out!

Having weather.com as one of its users, Acquia and more so Drupal
can prove their doubters wrong. Post implementation, this case study
can be used as a benchmark for performance , stability and reliability
by Acquia. Looking forward for more tech details around this!

With Millions of Visitors Weather.com is going to join Drupal and
it is a big achievement that further enhances other websites'
reliability on it. This shift of the website to Drupal has made things
easy as well so it is a good sign for future prospects.

Hi, just curious... were there any new weather modules developed
during the process of rebuilding weather.com that are available to
public so we can display weather on our drupal site with more
flexability?

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